The Idea of Progress eBook

By 1850 it was a familiar idea in Europe, but was
not yet universally accepted as obviously true.
The notion of social Progress had been growing in
the atmosphere of the notion of biological development,
but this development still seemed a highly precarious
speculation. The fixity of species and the creation
of man, defended by powerful interests and prejudices,
were attacked but were not shaken. The hypothesis
of organic evolution was much in the same position
as the Copernican hypothesis in the sixteenth century.
Then in 1859 Darwin intervened, like Galileo.
The appearance of the originofspecies
changed the situation by disproving definitely the
dogma of fixity of species and assigning real causes
for “transformism.” What might be
set aside before as a brilliant guess was elevated
to the rank of a scientific hypothesis, and the following
twenty years were enlivened by the struggle around
the evolution of life, against prejudices chiefly theological,
resulting in the victory of the theory.

The originofspecies led to the third
stage of the fortunes of the idea of Progress.
We saw how the heliocentric astronomy, by dethroning
man from his privileged position in the universe of
space and throwing him back on his own efforts, had
helped that idea to compete with the idea of a busy
Providence. He now suffers a new degradation
within the compass of his own planet. Evolution,
shearing him of his glory as a rational being specially
created to be the lord of the earth, traces a humble
pedigree for him. And this second degradation
was the decisive fact which has established the reign
of the idea of Progress.

2.

Evolution itself, it must be remembered, does not
necessarily mean, applied to society, the movement
of man to a desirable goal. It is a neutral,
scientific conception, compatible either with optimism
or with pessimism. According to different estimates
it may appear to be a cruel sentence or a guarantee
of steady amelioration. And it has been actually
interpreted in both ways.

In order to base Progress on Evolution two distinct
arguments are required. If it could be shown
that social life obeys the same general laws of evolution
as nature, and also that the process involves an increase
of happiness, then Progress would be as valid a hypothesis
as the evolution of living forms. Darwin had concluded
his treatise with these words:

As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants
of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch,
we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by
generation has never once been broken, and that no
cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence
we may look with some confidence to a secure future
of equally inappreciable length. And as natural
selection works solely by and for the good of each
being, all corporeal and mental environments will
tend to progress towards perfection.